Couple grateful for pandemic prison union
>> On the day Chelsea Moore got married, it had been six months since she last saw her fiancé, Christopher Blackwell.
But now Ms Moore, wearing a mask assigned to her, stood on a designated spot 1.8 metres from her soon-to-be husband. The room was empty save for a few chairs and tables and other seemingly storage-bound items haphazardly strewn about and a backdrop depicting a walking bridge in the woods in the early fall.
On Sept 18, Ms Moore and Blackwell were married in the visitors’ room at the Washington State Reformatory in the Monroe Correctional Complex, where he is a prisoner. The only guests were guards and staff and two witnesses. It was the furthest thing from the wedding of their dreams. Still, it was a day for which Ms Moore and Blackwell were grateful.
Blackwell, 39, is serving two sentences. The first is for a robbery, for which he was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to eight years. The second is for the murder of 17-year-old Joshua May during a home invasion in 2003. Blackwell was convicted of first-degree murder and received a 38-year prison sentence in 2007. There is no parole in Washington state. He will be released in 2045.
He grew up in the Hilltop neighbourhood of Tacoma, Washington, which was known for its gang violence in the late 1980s and is now being gentrified. He was incarcerated for the first time when he was 12 for stealing a car and would spend the next six years of his life in and out of jail. While incarcerated, Blackwell has received a general associate degree from Seattle Central College and is several classes away from a bachelor’s degree in political science from Adams State University, in Alamosa, Colorado. He writes about his experiences in prison and his work has appeared in BuzzFeed, the Marshall Project and Jewish Currents.
Ms Moore, 32, who grew up in the wealthy community of Ojai, California, is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Washington. She expects to complete her degree in the next couple of months. Ms Moore also just started law school at the University of Washington where she is also an instructor and teaching assistant. It is her aim, she said, to use her education to “do post-conviction review work for people with long sentences”.
The pair first crossed paths when Ms Moore volunteered to teach a constitutional law civil liberties class at the prison in the summer of 2017. Blackwell was in the class. Ms Moore was still finishing her dissertation and interested in criminal justice work when she met his mother, Connie Palmersheim, in February 2019 at a community meeting in Seattle for those interested in sentence reform and parole legislation. The random connection seemed like kismet to Ms Moore. “She told me a bit about what Chris was up to and encouraged me to reach out to see if I could help at all,” Ms Moore said in reference to his writing.
She and Blackwell began corresponding that February at which time they were both separated from and in the process of divorcing their first spouses. After they had begun corresponding, they were disheartened to learn there was a Washington Department of Corrections policy that did not allow former volunteers to be on a prisoner’s visitation list for three years after the date they stopped volunteering.
They set out to change the policy. “Through a lot of advocacy and persistence we were able to change the wait to a year instead of three years,” Ms Moore said. The new policy went into effect in November 2019, although it has not been posted on the Department of Corrections (DOC) website.
Although neither can remember the precise moment they knew they were in love, both were sure that’s precisely what it was. Blackwell says knowing that Ms Moore had read through his 360-plus-page juvenile record, and still wanted to be with him, made him sure she was the one. There was no formal proposal, although he did write a list of the 50 things he loved about her. They decided in January that they wanted to get married.
That month, the couple began the long process of applying with the Corrections Department to get married. But then the coronavirus pandemic struck and a difficult process became a near-impossible one. No prison visitation was allowed — just three months after she had begun regularly visiting him — and virtual marriages were not legal in Washington state at the time.
Ms Moore’s knowledge of the law and the system was invaluable during what she called a stressful process. She eventually learned the Washington Supreme Court proclaimed video marriages legal on May 29. On Aug 18, after more calls and emails, she heard the prison would allow a virtual ceremony. The next day, much to her surprise, she was notified the ceremony could be done in person after all.
The couple received a document that laid out the rules for the in-person ceremony including, “There will be no physical contact at any time between any parties, to include the bride and groom”.
On the day of their wedding, Blackwell was taken to the visitation room, wearing a mask that he had beaded himself with the letters BLM (Black Lives Matter). Blackwell is a bead artist and sold some of the works he made in prison to buy Ms Moore’s engagement ring. “Chris worked hard to sell his beadwork and make enough money to buy me a ring, a yellow diamond ring that has two crescent moons and one full moon in it,” she said.
“I know our life together will not be easy, but loving you is,” Ms Moore said. “And I promise to love you without regards to convenience or circumstance. This marriage is not the first mountain we have had to move to be together and it will not be the last.” The ceremony was led by a prison chaplain, Brian Henry. “We signed the papers, took a few photos, and then we were told the ceremony was over,” Blackwell said. “It makes me tear up now because I have no idea when we’ll see each other again.”